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Kathryn Garivay
I arrived in Chicago on a sweet September day in 1967. I fell in love with the marigolds on the quads and of course all the crazy gargoyles. The Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's album had come out that summer. As soon as I could I grew a moustache and got wire frames, just like John Lennon, the smart Beatle. I looked like a lot of other guys on campus.
My friend David Wexler, who had graduated the College and was staying on for grad school, said, "Watch. The Maroon will say your class is the brightest ever. Same every year." He was right. They said we were the brightest class ever and printed our mean SAT scores. Later I learned not to place much stock in standardized scores but was still impressed with my classmates.
Our education began right away. At a welcoming program Dean Wayne Booth told us to "See through the guff." I had never heard the word "guff" before but figured it was a Midwest term for "bull" and decided to take his advice. It turned out to be good counsel. There was a lot of guff being thrown around all right. Fortunately they also taught us how to see through it.
We heard the two phrases that for us became part of the Chicago lore. Value-free U of C. Life of the mind. It was tough, as most of us were also trying to figure out how to get a life of the body. It was even rumored that at the U of C you should be happy just to have a bare text in front of you and a bare room to read it in. That one made us shudder. We learned about how Hyde Park was developed, how poor people were displaced through so-called urban renewal, and how Julian Levi, the Woodlawn Corporation, and the University were no angels: "Hyde Park: middle class, black and white, shoulder to shoulder against the poor."
We started college in the middle of a dirty little war. We were told that some professors, the value-free types, were complicit in war research. We also knew we were at the bomb university. One of our first demos was protesting chemical research on campus. This consisted of picketing round and round the new bomb sculpture honoring Enrico Fermi and the first nuclear reaction under Amos Alonso Stagg Field. Professor Hans Morgenthau addressed us, and we felt legitimized.
At night we would stop by the Blue Gargoyle. The Gargoyle was a dark, peaceful coffee house in a church that served as a folkie hangout and the center for cadre, Chicago Area Draft Resisters. Some of the CADRE guys would ask us, "So when are you going to tear up your draft card?" The Blue Gargoyle was an emotional refuge, a still point in a turning world. On weekends one of our classmates, Angie Lee, would sing like an angel and accompany herself on guitar. To hear her do "Until It's Time for You to Go" and "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," her voice echoing all around, the candles flickering, you'd hold your breath and feel the world was at peace.
I felt lost and lonely a lot of the time. Pierce Tower seemed like an experiment run by a demented professor: put two strangers in a concrete cubicle the size of a casket, give them a rigorous academic load, then see if they survive. A number of first-years felt the same way and worse. (We learned to say first-year instead of freshman; it was explained that so many people took more than four years to finish the College that each class name was politely leveled and extended to fifth- and sixth-year students.)
One of the best things that happened was a bunch of alienated first-year comrades decided to form our own seminar and get credit for it. What was really going on was we were struggling to figure out who we were and what the hell we were doing but not quite knowing how to deal with that. The organizers (Vicki Wirth, Ruth Hazzard, Ruth Schoenbach, and others) rounded up two professors, Vere Chappell from philosophy and David Orlinsky in psychology, and told them we wanted to study the Self. Fine, the professors said, but you're going to do it U of C style and read Plato, Descartes, Freud, and other dead white guys to see what they have to say about the Self-which we did. Mr. Chappell and his wife graciously invited us into their home, and we were thrilled to have class in their living room. That seminar, with its camaraderie, saved me from further despair.
Sadly, a year later most of those students as well as many others from my class had disappeared; somehow they had managed to transfer out to other schools under my nose. I never heard them talk about it, they just figured out how to punch through the bureaucracy and left.
That first year we worked to get the hang of academic life. It was easier for some than others. I remember seeing classmates, 18-year-old kids who already looked like distinguished professors, with beards, pipes, elbow patches, sagacious miens, and deliberate, cautious speech patterns. Years later they turned out to be distinguished professors with beards, pipes, elbow patches, sagacious miens, and deliberate, cautious speech patterns.
Getting a grade lower than you were used to after you thought you wrote a smart paper was a humbling experience. I didn't appreciate Plato ("Most assuredly, Socrates!") until I read him again a few years later. I loved C. Wright Mills's Sociological Imagination, the Communist Manifesto, Paradise Lost, and War and Peace. I read about old Pierre and Natasha by pulling an all-nighter on uppers on the top floor of Pierce Tower, watching the sun come up over Lake Michigan.
We made fun of academic language-meaningless, qualifying phrases, like "in a sense"-and marveled at the higher order level of "methodology," the methodical study of method, thinking about thinking. We studied whether intellectuals had any responsibility to society. Hell yes, we said. The University was conditioning us to salivate in anticipation of the new library (Regenstein) that was to be built over Stagg Field: where football was, there shall studying be. Even the graffiti in the dorms was erudite: Thucydides sucks Herodotus. Nietzsche's peachy, Sartre's smarter. When organized football on campus made a modest comeback, Students for Violent Non-Action (SVNA) provided us with a team cheer:
Everybody finds a little piece of the quads and makes it their own. The coffee shop in the basement of Swift, the Divinity School, was a favorite for many; maybe it still is. I loved the Harriet Monroe Poetry Room on the top floor of Harper, quiet and peaceful with a view of the South Side.
Dorm life was crazy and intense. Marijuana was the drug of choice although binge drinking among some was a big deal. Hallucinogens were always in supply. A friend had taken LSD and complained of flashbacks a few weeks later. I suggested he check himself in to the psych ward at Billings and walked him over there. I had my own bout of anxiety one late night without doing any drugs.
There were a few friendly, available, male graduate students who hung out in the dorms, offering to help us get the hang of college life with tips about professors and courses. Some seemed a bit too friendly and available. Most of us were "latent heterosexuals," to use Woody Allen's phrase, and it was a struggle for us shy types to arrange the kind of contact we craved. Some classmates paired up immediately and began to live together as soon as they could get out of the dorms. Early on I endured one of those classic dark nights of the soul, lying awake till dawn while next door in a single room my more cool, confident, and assertive friend was with a woman classmate whom I too admired and desired.
Twenty years later at reunion a number of the students who had looked like they had their act together confessed they didn't know what they were doing regarding sex and relationships. They just acted like they did. I found that to be a relief. If we could have found a way to talk about it then, we would have been a hell of a lot better off. The seminar on the Self veered away from addressing personal issues and instead intellectualized the topic, which to some extent perpetuated the sense of alienation.
Not only in the classroom but also in the dorm you could suddenly find yourself cut down to size, humbled by what you didn't know. Once I stopped by the open door of an older student's room while his radio was playing a classical piece. "I wonder which one that is," he mused aloud. "That's Tschaikovsky's violin concerto," I said, proud to know. "Of course," he replied. "But whose version?" I walked away deflated. In my family there was only one, Jascha Heifitz's, with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony. It had never occurred to me to listen to or compare other violinists or other conductors. Now that I get to replay the scene from the standpoint of a middle-aged boddhisattva-in-training, I might have smiled at this pompous twit (judgment, judgment), noticed my own ego attachment, given him and myself compassion, then stayed on to learn from him, thanked him, and felt OK.
The dorms did provide a great musical education. I picked blues guitar with a second-year African-American student who had the most incredible set of albums. I was introduced to the music of Chicago blues players like Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, and Paul Butterfield. My friends turned me on to their jazz collections. We must have played John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" and "Afro-Blue" a thousand times. During the day at any time you could hear the best rock and folk music-sorry, generations X, Y, and Z, you may be tired of us baby boomers' cultural hegemony, but it's true. Each time Dylan or the Beatles put out a new mind-blowing album, it felt like a whole other part of your own self unfolded that you didn't know was there. It was like Grace Slick said: "I'm doing things that don't have a name yet."
Some nights were magic. Outside would be zero degrees, winter was never going to end, the war was never going to end, you'd be in a room with both sexes, maybe stoned, with a candle or two, incense burning, listening to somebody playing guitar and singing "Suzanne." Sounds corny now, but They can't take that away from me. And as we used to joke back then, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean They're not out to get you." Whether in those days it was the Life of the Mind police or the Chicago police, your subversive right to pleasure threatened somebody.
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